Inside Zipline's Autonomous System: 140M Miles, Zero Incidents

1. 0:00 – 2:28

   Introduction

   1. EWEric Watson0:00

      I remember being in Rwanda early days and going out and meeting with some of the doctors and lab techs that we were serving, and asking for them, like, you know, "How's it going? What, what do you think? What's your feedback?" Here I am kind of, uh, you know, a, a up-and-coming, you know, l- learning engineer thinking they're gonna say something about the drone or some of these things, and the main piece of feedback that I received was, "People get sick 24/7. Why are you guys only open 12 hours a day?"

   2. ALAlfred Lin0:23

      Hmm.

   3. EWEric Watson0:24

      Right?

   4. ALAlfred Lin0:24

      Especially when you're delivering life-saving blood.

   5. EWEric Watson0:26

      Yeah, exactly. And so that was a really key insight for me, where it's like, man, we have found product market fit in a market where, yeah, our, our, you know, our product wasn't great yet, but it was solving a real need. Uh, and so having that, that really beachhead market where there's a real problem being solved, and when your customer is telling you that their main feedback is they want more of your service, it's like that's a good sign. [upbeat music]

   6. ALAlfred Lin1:04

      Welcome, Keller and Eric, um, to the show. You guys have been working at Zipline for a long period of time. Keller's the co-founder, and Eric, you are in charge of systems engineering and safety. And we got lots of things to talk about in this whole world of drones, drone systems, and how you guys started in this hardware space before LLMs even started. So we have lots of questions.

   7. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton1:26

      Thanks for having us.

   8. EWEric Watson1:26

      Awesome. [laughs]

   9. ALAlfred Lin1:27

      But you don't like-

   10. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton1:28

       Yeah, thank you

   11. ALAlfred Lin1:28

       ... you don't like Zipline being described as a drone company, even though you're the, you're probably the largest autonomous drone company in the world right now.

   12. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton1:36

       I mean, you know, we, we've always wanted to be an extremely customer-obsessed company, and the reality is none of our customers care at all about drones. You know, like, we... Our, our goal was always to build an automated logistics system for Earth and to approximate teleportation. And all the customers who are, like, living on Zipline today, they really don't care how... They don't care about the technology operating behind the curtain. What they care about is their ability to, like, download an app, open it up, uh, you know, see a huge number of different brands and amazing, you know, restaurants that they wanna shop with, and then click a button and have it delivered to them five minutes later. So we've always really tried to focus on the experience rather on, rather than on, like, the specific technology.

   13. ALAlfred Lin2:19

       Well, this show is about technology.

   14. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton2:21

       [laughs] We're excited about that.

   15. ALAlfred Lin2:23

       This podcast is about technology. What is the underlying technology behi- behind Zipline?

2. 2:28 – 4:09

   Early Vision and Regulation

   1. ALAlfred Lin2:28

      Uh, you started in 2011. Uh, you pivoted in 2014. This is way before anything related to, uh-

   2. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton2:36

      AI or robotics

   3. ALAlfred Lin2:37

      ... AI, robotics-

   4. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton2:38

      Yeah

   5. ALAlfred Lin2:39

      ... foundation models, anything related to that.

   6. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton2:41

      Yeah.

   7. ALAlfred Lin2:41

      But you've kind of, you were before all of that, and you're riding the wave of all of the things that have come afterward as well.

   8. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton2:47

      Yeah, this was when, like, starting a robotics company was the dumbest thing you could possibly do. [laughs] Like, why, you know, you're talking to an investor in that time about... I mean, it wasn't easy, and it was particularly hard 'cause so many of those conversations, you know, I mean, I was 23, 24. Eric joined the company around that time. Uh, and we were starting to describe this vision of an autonomous logistics system for Earth that would be 10 times as fast, half the cost, zero emission. Um, you know, one of the biggest problems when we were trying to raise money for that vision was investors would say, "Isn't this illegal in the US?" In fact, I think that that's a question you asked me when we started [laughs] talking about this. And it's like-

   9. ALAlfred Lin3:23

      We weren't, we weren't allowed to fly beyond, uh, visual line of sight.

   10. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton3:27

       I mean, we weren't allowed to fly at all, really. But, like, yeah. A- and, and so the answer was, "Yes, it's illegal."

   11. ALAlfred Lin3:32

       [laughs]

   12. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton3:32

       And then most investors would be like, "Well, we don't invest in illegal things." [laughs]

   13. ALAlfred Lin3:35

       [laughs]

   14. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton3:35

       "So, like, we're not gonna invest." But, you know, for weird reasons, this is what basically took Zipline down this path of, like, well, if it's illegal in the US, then we can launch in other parts of the world where, you know, the, the value of this service would be extremely high. Um, Zipline decided to launch in Rwanda in 2016, delivering blood transfusions directly to hospitals and primary care facilities. Um, this enabled us to have a use case that was so powerful that a government would work very closely with us to make it happen.

   15. EWEric Watson4:03

       Make it legal.

   16. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton4:04

       And to make it legal, uh, or at least make an exemption to their existing kind of regulatory framework.

3. 4:09 – 6:49

   Rwanda Launch Hard Lessons

   1. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton4:09

      And, um, you know, and then the other thing, you know, when it comes to how to think about Zipline as a company, you know, when we launched in 2016, we were like, "We have this really cool drone. We put all this work into designing this really cool aircraft that, you know, and it's, it has all these great fundamental features." And when we launched, it was a total disaster, uh, because the reality, what we, what we learned in that first year is for the first eight... We, we'd signed a contract to sign 21 ho- to serve 21 hospitals, and we served one hospital for the first nine months. And Eric, in particular, like, how much did you sleep during those nine months?

   2. EWEric Watson4:40

      I spent a lot of time in Rwanda.

   3. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton4:42

      And-

   4. EWEric Watson4:42

      I didn't sleep a lot

   5. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton4:43

      ... and then when you're in the US, like, we'd get woken up-

   6. EWEric Watson4:45

      Oh, yeah

   7. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton4:45

      ... at, like, midnight 'cause that's when-

   8. EWEric Watson4:46

      Yeah

   9. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton4:46

      ... the distribution center was turning on, and it would, everything would be broken. Nothing was working. It was totally desperate. Constant all-nighters and working through the weekends because we'd made this big error, which was the thinking that, like, the cool vehicle was the majority of the solution.

   10. ALAlfred Lin4:59

       Hmm.

   11. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton5:00

       What we learned during that first year is that the drone is 15% of the complexity of the solution. Like, Zipline had-

   12. ALAlfred Lin5:06

       The physical drone, the hardware of it-

   13. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton5:08

       Yeah. Yeah

   14. ALAlfred Lin5:08

       ... is only 15%.

   15. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton5:09

       We had to build so many auxiliary software systems, maintenance systems. Uh, how do we hold the inventory and do inventory management? How do we integrate with a national civil aviation authority, which we'll talk more about. How do we integrate with a national healthcare system? How do we do ordering and demand management? You know, we, we had to build out all of these other parts of the overall logistics system. So this is the reason I think a lot of people might look at Zipline and be like, "Wow, it's a cool drone company," or, "They build a cool aircraft." The reality is the aircraft is, like, 15% of the solution that's required to build something that just feels like magical, reliable teleportation, 24/7, 365 to the now, you know, hundreds of millions of people who depend on the service.

   16. EWEric Watson5:50

       Speaking of 24/7, I remember being in Rwanda early days and going out and meeting with some of the doctors and lab techs that we were serving and asking for them, like, you know, "How's it going? What, what do you think? What's your feedback?" Just really being customer obsessed and, and wanting to optimize the product.

   17. SPSpeaker6:05

       And, you know, here I am kind of, uh, you know, a, a up-and-coming, you know, l- learning engineer thinking they're gonna say something about the drone or some of these things, and the main piece of feedback that I received was, "People get sick 24/7. Why are you guys only open 12 hours a day?"

   18. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton6:20

       Hmm.

   19. SPSpeaker6:21

       Right? And so-

   20. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton6:22

       Especially when you're delivering life-saving blood.

   21. SPSpeaker6:24

       Yeah, exactly. And so that was our... You know, we-- You gotta start somewhere, right? So we started being open 12 hours a day and trying to expand and, and grow from there. And so that was a really key insight for me where it's like, man, we have found product market fit in a market where, yeah, our, our, you know, our product wasn't great yet, but it was solving a real need. Uh, and so having that, that really beachhead market where there's a real problem being solved, and when your customer is telling you that their main feedback is they want more of your service, it's like

4. 6:49 – 9:35

   Scaling to 24/7 Impact

   1. SPSpeaker6:49

      that's a good sign.

   2. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton6:50

      Yeah. We, we were 24/7 within the first year.

   3. SPSpeaker6:52

      So we went 24/7. Exactly.

   4. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton6:53

      We're now 24/7/365. I mean, on Christmas Day, I usually call all of our different distribution centers to, like, thank them and check in with them.

   5. SPSpeaker6:59

      Hmm.

   6. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton7:00

      So, like, there is no day when these facilities don't depend on... You know, we went from serving one to 20 to 500, now to 5,000 hospitals and health facilities across the world, across eight countries that are served by the system. It's become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth. Eric-

   7. ALAlfred Lin7:16

      Can you size that for us, the largest system on Earth?

   8. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton7:19

      Just crossed 140 million commercial autonomous miles, which, I mean, how many times is that? I think that that's like-

   9. SPSpeaker7:23

      It's over-

   10. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton7:24

       ... to the sun and back or what do you think?

   11. SPSpeaker7:25

       One of the, one of the things that I like is every road in the United States, there's a lot of roads in the United States, driving on every single road more than 30 times.

   12. ALAlfred Lin7:33

       Wow.

   13. SPSpeaker7:33

       That's a good stat.

   14. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton7:34

       That's a lot.

   15. SPSpeaker7:34

       That's a lot, just to put it in perspective.

   16. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton7:36

       You know, seeing the impact that that system is now having in across all these eight countries, I mean, University of Pennsylvania just published a study showing a 51% reduction in maternal mortality thanks to Zipline.

   17. SPSpeaker7:49

       Wow.

   18. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton7:49

       So half as many moms losing their lives in childbirth. Um, we have, you know, a- across all the different use cases that Zipline serves, some of our partners estimate that we're saving between 10 and 12,000 lives a year, and that impact is growing exponentially as we're now expanding, especially as a result of this new partnership we have with the US State Department.

   19. ALAlfred Lin8:06

       What is that partnership with the State Department?

   20. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton8:07

       In December, we announced a $550 million partnership with the US State Department to expand the impact of Zipline's life-saving service across a lot of the countries where we're already operating. So with USAID being shut down, the US was really seeking, like, new ways of engaging in these countries and helping save lives in these countries, but they wanted to do it in a way that would, um, that, that would accelerate the economies of these countries and help the US economically. And so the new strategy they're calling commercial diplomacy. The idea is that we want all of the developing world should be built on top of US AI and robotics technology. We should be going and, you know, economically helping. We should be bringing the best that the US has to offer. Interesting thing is when you talk to these countries about what they want, they'll tell you they are sick of, you know, low quality aid provided by NGOs for free because these services engender dependence and prevent economic growth in the countries. What they want is high-paying jobs, entrepreneurship, technology.

   21. ALAlfred Lin9:04

       Hmm.

   22. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton9:04

       And so the US is, is, you know, going through a big strategic shift where it's like, well, we have that. We have those things. Like, so let's, let's basically go out and incentivize these countries to adopt that kind of infrastructure, make sure that, you know, as these countries are accelerating, they're, they're doing it using US robotics and, and AI technology, and this is something that will be great for those countries. It saves lives. It saves them money. But it also means that it will, it will make it possible for the US to secure our lead in manufacturing and robotics over the decade to come.

5. 9:35 – 11:15

   Real World Ops Surprises

   1. SPSpeaker9:35

      I'm curious about, you know, you guys, because you now run the largest autonomous system in the world, and you, you launched it 10 years ago at this point, so you've been in production for 10 years. You've learned a lot of stuff that your average engineer sitting behind a computer screen has no idea they're gonna run into when they try to deploy AI into the real world. And so I, I'm curious what some of those lessons learned are, and maybe one way to ask the question is, what popped up over the last 10 years that you never would have guessed you needed to be good at when you first started launching these systems in 2016? Yeah. You know, we started off delivering life-saving products, right? And our customers need, need life-saving products all the time in all weather conditions. And you would think it's, you know, wind, these things, but one of the weirdest things is actually solar weather. So there's solar flares that happen on the sun. So they're basically big explosions that send radiation to the Earth. They can mess with the ionosphere, and that can cause basically the RF signals coming from GPS satellites to be faster or slower than you expect, and that can lead to degradation and challenges in navigation systems. And so here's one example that we, you know, when we were starting off, we didn't think that this was gonna be something we have to figure out. Uh, but we actually have, uh, you know, gone pretty deep in this space and, and really it's two things. One is designing our navigation system and our, our GNSS systems to be robust to these conditions to ensure that we can still know where, you know, where aircraft are with centimeter level precision in those conditions, in those challenging solar flare times, as well as designing the system to have redundancy beyond GNSS such that if things get really bad, we can still safely operate.

6. 11:15 – 20:24

   Safety Redundancy Failover

   1. ALAlfred Lin11:15

      Eric, you're in charge of safety. Tell us about, uh, what you've learned about safety today and, uh, and specifically about the compute failover system that you have.

   2. SPSpeaker11:25

      Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so many things that we've learned over the last decade of operating, you know, the, the system in the real world. Um, one of the things that, that we're proud of is, uh, how we've, we've developed, to, to your point, um, compute failover. So there's a flight computer, flies the aircraft, lots of sensors come into this, uh, into this computer, and that basically does a lot of math and sends commands to actuators, right? So motors, control services, these things. So this is the brain that flies the aircraft, right? Um, there, you know, one of the things that we've learned is you need to assume that any part of the system can have a fault, can have a hiccup.

   3. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton12:00

      Yep.

   4. SPSpeaker12:00

      Something can go wrong.

   5. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton12:01

      Yep.

   6. SPSpeaker12:01

      And that's how you really design something to be robust, reliable, and safe. So

   7. EWEric Watson12:05

      What do we do if this flight computer has a challenge? Could be a software challenge, it could be a connector challenge, could be these different things.

   8. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton12:12

      Bit flip due to solar radiation.

   9. EWEric Watson12:13

      All kinds of things, right? And so what we've done is we have two flight computers, and both of these flight computers think that they're flying the aircraft at any given point in time. They all are receiving all the information from the sensors, they're all sending commands to the actuators, and there's, uh, like, a kind of a third arbiter, a little computer, that is monitoring the health of those two and telling everyone, every other node on the, on the aircraft who to listen to, who's actually in charge.

   10. SPSpeaker12:37

       What if the arbiter fails?

   11. EWEric Watson12:39

       Yeah, if the arbiter fails, then the, the primary computer that was flying just keeps flying, right? So one's in charge, and if the thing that's monitoring its health fails, then now we say, "Okay," like, you know, "Now we're just gonna keep flying on the thing that was good, and we're gonna keep flying the mission." Um, so-

   12. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton12:54

       Two heads are better than one.

   13. EWEric Watson12:55

       [laughs]

   14. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton12:55

       [laughs]

   15. EWEric Watson12:57

       Yeah. So something that we're really proud of, um, we had, actually had one of these events happen, uh-

   16. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton13:01

       First time last week

   17. EWEric Watson13:01

       ... a couple weeks ago, yeah, where we had, after a delivery, we delivered the package to the customer, and then we had a, a hiccup on the main flight computer, and we had switched over to the backup. The aircraft flew itself home, landed, everything was totally fine. So just, you know, designing the systems to be robust and reliable through and through is, is, you know, how you get to two and a half million deliveries and 140 million miles flown with no safety incidents.

   18. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton13:23

       And a lot of what Zipline's doing, it's not like, oh, this is totally revolutionary. No one has ever thought about having a secondary flight computer.

   19. EWEric Watson13:29

       Yeah.

   20. SPSpeaker13:29

       Yeah.

   21. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton13:29

       That's how a Boeing 777 works.

   22. EWEric Watson13:31

       Yeah.

   23. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton13:31

       But the cost of a flight computer on a Boeing 777 is in the millions of dollars. And so a lot of what Zipline's having to do is take a lot of the best ideas that you can see in aerospace safety-

   24. EWEric Watson13:43

       Best practices from aerospace

   25. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton13:44

       ... various best practices.

   26. EWEric Watson13:45

       Yeah.

   27. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton13:46

       And you, uh, and then you've gotta figure out how to build that using components coming out of the smartphone supply chain.

   28. EWEric Watson13:51

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

   29. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton13:51

       So you can do it for, you know, tens of dollars or hundreds of dollars. You can achieve similar levels of safety to traditional aerospace, but you can move 100 times as fast at 1/100 of the cost.

   30. EWEric Watson14:03

       Yeah.
7. 20:24 – 25:34

   Precision Delivery Pod Tech

   1. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton20:24

      necessarily think.

   2. SPSpeaker20:25

      Can I ask you about the precision? Like, one of the things that blew my mind when I saw some of the... I haven't had a chance to experience in person, you know, a delivery.

   3. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton20:32

      You gotta come, Pat.

   4. SPSpeaker20:32

      I know. I gotta, I gotta go experience it.

   5. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton20:34

      Alice, Alice. [laughs]

   6. SPSpeaker20:34

      But just, but just in watching the videos, the drone's 100 feet up, and it drops the package. It lowers the package to a, I don't know, a circle that's got a 18-inch radius or whatever it is, right?

   7. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton20:46

      Yeah.

   8. SPSpeaker20:46

      Like, how do you guys achieve such precision even when it's windy, even when it's raining?

   9. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton20:52

      Yeah.

   10. SPSpeaker20:52

       Like, how do you, how do you pull that off?

   11. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton20:54

       First of all, the aircraft's about 100 meters up.

   12. SPSpeaker20:56

       100 meters up.

   13. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton20:56

       Yeah, so it's-

   14. SPSpeaker20:57

       Okay, yeah. There you go.

   15. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton20:57

       Yeah, it makes it harder. Um-

   16. ALAlfred Lin20:59

       [laughs]

   17. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton20:59

       And, uh, you know, there's multiple layers. There, there's the, the delivery pod that comes down.

   18. SPSpeaker21:05

       Yeah.

   19. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton21:05

       Right? So the delivery pod comes down. That's really the delivery and pickup, like, precision part of it, right? So the, the drone is hovering above. Um, it, it, you know, it knows where the target is. Maybe let's say it's, it's this coffee table, for example, if there wasn't a roof above us. Um, so it's this coffee table, and so the aircraft is gonna hover above, but it actually needs to consider what the wind conditions are.

   20. SPSpeaker21:25

       Yeah.

   21. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton21:25

       All right? So if the wind's blowing in one direction, then the aircraft's gonna kind of be shifted, you know, upwind, right? So it's gonna shift in the direction to help, um, with that, with those wind conditions. And then it's gonna lower that delivery pod down. Um, as Keller mentioned, we, we do, uh, take advantage of GNSS, so, uh, re- real-time connection GNSS. That gives you centimeter level, um, confidence of, of where you are. But the thing is, we don't know the GPS coordinates of this table, right? It's not like someone came and surveyed the middle of the table and sent us the coordinates, right? No one wants to do that. So what we have to do is we kind of, that we use that to kind of get close, right? We're like, "Okay, here's the backyard. Here's where we kind of know things, that the things roughly are." And then the job of this delivery pod is to be lowered down, you know, fight the wind conditions, fight these different things, and be able to use its onboard perception and autonomy systems to identify, where's the best place for me to leave the package, right? Like, if there's a little table and there's a whole bunch of drinks, probably I shouldn't, you know, try and drop down on top of these drinks and make a mess. Maybe I should go to the ground right next to the table, right? And so it has these autonomous, you know, onboard real-time compute, uh, to be able to identify, what am I looking at? What am I seeing? And how can I find the best place to leave the package? And then come down, touch the ground, opens its doors, gets retracted back up, and there you go. The package is left on the ground, and the, the delivery pod comes back up, stows, and the aircraft flies back home. A couple big advantages, I mean, just to be specific. So that pod, it not only has its own Nvidia GPU running its own AI autonomy stack, so it can-

   22. SPSpeaker22:54

       Yeah

   23. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton22:54

       ... survey-

   24. SPSpeaker22:55

       Sensors, yeah

   25. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton22:55

       ... and, like, know exactly where it's delivering, even at night.

   26. SPSpeaker22:58

       Yeah.

   27. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton22:59

       But, um, it's, it's also controlling its own position-

   28. SPSpeaker23:02

       That's right

   29. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton23:02

       ... in the X and Y axis, so it can-

   30. SPSpeaker23:04

       Yep
8. 25:34 – 26:51

   Building the Drone Network

   1. EWEric Watson25:34

      in. We have opinions on how this should work. The regulators had opinions on maybe how they thought it should work, and so it was a partnership over the course of a couple years to identify what those paths looked like and how we could kind of converge and align before we were able to execute on that.

   2. ALAlfred Lin25:46

      And you had to show your ability to manage all these aircrafts that are flying, so you wrote systems, you built systems.

   3. EWEric Watson25:52

      Yeah, I think it's a huge part of, you know, Keller's mentioning that the drone is only a part of the, of the, you know, of the overall system, the overall complexity. What we're really building is an infrastructure layer, right? We're building an infrastructure layer that can enable instant access to products, and you don't do that with one aircraft flying from one place to another place. You do that with a network of, um, charging locations, hundreds of aircraft, uh, spread across an area that, uh, with the autonomous systems in the, in the cloud that can understand where am I having demand, where, where do I have supply, where do I have aircraft, um, what's coming up is about to be the dinner rush, uh, what's the weather at these different locations, how can I kind of self-balance these things, as well as how do I efficiently, uh, pull, like, pull in people when needed, right? So these, these aircraft are autonomous. They're operating. They don't require human intervention through these flights. Uh, but there are times in which it makes sense to alert a person that, hey, maybe there's, there's an issue here, or the weather is a little bit, uh, you know, the wind is climbing in this area,

9. 26:51 – 28:22

   Fleet Commanders Explained

   1. EWEric Watson26:51

      right? So there are humans pr- you know, trained aviation professionals that are monitoring our, like, our network, I would call it.

   2. ALAlfred Lin26:57

      They're fleet commanders.

   3. EWEric Watson26:58

      Fleet commanders, that's right.

   4. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton27:00

      We used to call them pilots.

   5. ALAlfred Lin27:01

      [laughs]

   6. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton27:02

      Um, you know, 'cause when we originally launched in the US, the first regulatory permission we got was to fly one-to-one.

   7. EWEric Watson27:07

      Mm.

   8. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton27:07

      So that meant that we had one pilot sitting in an office-

   9. EWEric Watson27:10

      Remote pilot in command

   10. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton27:11

       ... remote pilot in command-

   11. EWEric Watson27:12

       Yeah

   12. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton27:12

       ... who was sitting in an office basically just observing an aircraft do its thing. And again, you know, it's exceedingly rare that a human should ever have to issue any kind of a command to a vehicle, but we would have one human watching one aircraft. Not great for unit economics. Uh, but as Zipline proved out these systems, we went from one-to-one to one-to-three, one-to-six, one-to-20, one-to-40. We're now operating one-to-100 and have plans to go well beyond that.

   13. ALAlfred Lin27:38

       One, one pilot man- Well, one fleet command-

   14. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton27:39

       One fleet commander now

   15. ALAlfred Lin27:40

       ... commander now.

   16. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton27:40

       So yeah, we technically changed the name 'cause we think pilot's confusing, so we're inspired by Ender's Game. We now call these, this group of, this team of people at Zipline, we call them fleet commanders, and it actually says that in the FAA documentation. We say, "Fleet commanders shall do the following." And yeah, they are overseeing a group of 100 aircraft. And to me, this is, like, the exciting, cool thing about technology 'cause people think about, like, well, you know, uh, what about, um, you know, how humans used to solve this problem? It's like, it's not, you know, the... I- it- it's cool how robots enable humans to, like, up-level, right? Like, the human is still getting to, like, strategically manage the system. It's just the human is now maintaining and commanding robots rather than, like, doing the actual work herself.

10. 28:22 – 29:51

    Scaling to a Million a Day

    1. EWEric Watson28:22

       Now that you guys are kind of in hyper-scale mode, you've solved so many problems in the last 10 or 15 years. What new problems are you running into?

    2. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton28:29

       Yeah, I mean, w- what I would say, like, thematically, I, I mentioned earlier that, as, you know, getting to two and a half million deliveries, the, you know, the, "Oh, it only happens every couple years." It's, like, kind of a one in a million chances.

    3. EWEric Watson28:40

       Yeah.

    4. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton28:41

       Um, these things start to matter, right? We're, we're on the path towards a million deliveries every day, and if you have a one in a million situation, it's gonna happen every single day, right?

    5. EWEric Watson28:49

       Yeah. Can I just, just, just to really make that clear. So it took Zipline from 2014, when we started building the original version of the technology, to 2024 to do our first million deliveries. Was it the end of 2024? Maybe it was even early 2025, actually, that we did... We had done a million deliveries in the cumulative history of the company.

    6. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton29:10

       Yeah.

    7. EWEric Watson29:11

       So it was a, almost a decade, maybe.

    8. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton29:13

       Yeah.

    9. EWEric Watson29:13

       Say about a decade to do a million deliveries. Zipline is now, in the very near future, going to be doing a million deliveries a day, and so that is definitely humbling. It's like, wow, okay. Everything about the way we've been solving the problem is gonna break. The bar goes way, way up.

    10. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton29:31

        Yeah.

    11. EWEric Watson29:31

        And I mean, you know, one specific example, you know, maintenance becomes really hard. Like, [laughs] you know, the scale of the problems, the number of vehicles that you're managing in the fleet, the cost of a screw-up or if some- if a certain process is operating in very inefficient ways becomes extremely high. And so there's just high degree of criticality for all

11. 29:51 – 31:52

    Autonomy Enables 24 7 Ops

    1. EWEric Watson29:51

       these systems. One interesting point, though, you know, there are a lot of ways that these systems operate that I think people don't yet appreciate the advantages of autonomy. One good example is that, like, the system wants to operate 24/7.

    2. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton30:02

       Yeah.

    3. EWEric Watson30:02

       And it does operate 24/7. So I think people are used to, like, logistics as generally being like, well, here are the hours when humans are driving trucks.

    4. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton30:10

       That's not how these systems operate. They want to operate 24/7. They can be fully utilized. Uh, they, they can be as happily delivering at 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM, delivering something so it's, like, ready for you on your doorstep or in your backyard when you wake up at 6:00 AM before you go to work, as they are delivering at 2:00 PM. Um, they can deliver in five minutes. They are, they are available 100% of the time. We are soon gonna be flying vehicles straight out of our factory in South San Francisco into commercial operation. If you've seen, you know, Tesla Model, uh, 3s and Model Ys delivering themselves to customers-

    5. EWEric Watson30:40

       Yeah

    6. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton30:40

       ... Zipline aircraft will fly straight from the factory into operation. It's huge advantage from a maintenance perspective, that as soon as a vehicle needs to go through some kind of proactive maintenance, it will fly itself to the maintenance depot, so the human can then quickly make... you know, do whatever process necessary, and then the vehicle flies itself back into operations. We can also dynamically assign capacity in a metro based on what the system is seeing. There's no, like, set home for a vehicle. It can go to wherever it's needed.

    7. EWEric Watson31:06

       Yeah, I think to, to, to your question about, you know, getting to a million a day and what are the new challenges, I think, you know, Keller hit on some of them. To the previous thought about the drone is only 15% of the problem, really it's the way that we currently manufacture aircraft, maintain aircraft, support all these things, you know, troubleshoot problems. Like, the way that we do it today isn't gonna work when we're at a million deliveries a day. And so there's still, like, okay, we need better tools. We need better software systems. We need better processes. We need better, uh, you know, all these things. So it's like, um, you know, Elon talks about designing the machine that builds the machine. And so, you know, this is really, uh, one of the things that I see Zipline tackling over the coming couple years, is we are going to be investing much more in the machines that build and run the machines.

12. 31:52 – 36:08

    Reinventing Air Traffic Control

    1. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton31:52

       Hmm. I mean, from a scale perspective, I think the largest airline in the US is doing about 5,000 flights a day.

    2. EWEric Watson31:58

       Yeah.

    3. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton31:58

       Zipline is going to surpass that in the next month. And when we get to a million deliveries a day, Zipline will be doing, like, somewhere between, I don't know, 40 and 80 times as many flights in the US in commercial airspace as all other airlines combined.

    4. EWEric Watson32:14

       Yeah.

    5. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton32:15

       And so it's obviously a different cla- it's a completely different class of aircraft. It's a totally different kind of problem. But the reality is when you look at air traffic control, they don't make a distinction. And so there's, there's also, when you talk about all the, you know, auxiliary systems that have to be built, there is a huge transformation that's gonna have to happen in air traffic control as we start to realize that... You know, people are really excited about electrification of vehicles. People are excited about autonomous vehicles. The reality is, what, as those transformations occur, there are gonna be 10 times as many autonomous vehicles in the air as there are using these teeny, archaic, constrained things that we call roads. And so, uh, like, the sky is a big place. It makes sense to utilize it. You can give earth back to humans. You can make neighborhoods quieter, safer, less pollution, less traffic. You know, you can make huge improvements to earth if we can more effectively utilize the sky. This is gonna require huge transformation of how we think about air traffic control in the US, and it means that, um, we need to design it with AI and autonomy in mind, rather than the way it was designed, which was in 1950 using, you know, pencils and paper and note cards and, like, a human looking out trying to watch the airplane.

    6. ALAlfred Lin33:23

       Are you helping the FAA des- design that?

    7. EWEric Watson33:26

       It's really... Yeah, I mean, what needs to happen is, uh, like, collaborative innovation, is one way to put it, right? It's like, it, one company solving this problem for themselves is not going to solve the problem for the industry. And so we are heavily involved in... I mean, first of all, what a key part of the solution, we believe, is aircraft should be talking to each other. They should be telling each other where they are. They should be automatically detecting that, hey, there's a conflict on the horizon here, and so therefore we're gonna, you know, you go up, I go down, right? These kinds of, these kinds of things. Um, and our aircraft do that, and we're working with other, uh, kind of, you know, o- other new entrants into the airspace with autonomous aircraft and autonomous drones to do the same thing, to make sure that our systems can talk to their systems, and we can all collaborate, uh, to make sure it's efficient and safe use- usage of the airspace.

    8. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton34:12

       Yeah.

    9. EWEric Watson34:13

       We're also, to your point, Alfred, working with regulators, working with standards bodies, to take some of these best practice and innovations that, that we and others have developed and try and make them, you know, broadly accepted and utilized, so that way we can all collaborate, and we can all, you know, safely and efficiently use the airspace.

    10. ALAlfred Lin34:28

        'Cause you guys are, have developed a really sophisticated-

    11. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton34:31

        Yeah, like we, we-

    12. ALAlfred Lin34:31

        ... detect and avoid system

    13. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton34:31

        ... because we were, when we were launching in all these other countries, like, we had to build something from scratch. And so we built the thing from scratch. We provided all this software to the civil aviation authority so that they could use it to monitor this entirely new class of autonomous vehicles in the airspace. Interestingly, you know, there are multiple public companies in the United States that build air traffic control software that are worth more than $10 billion, right? [laughs] And so it's like, I often look at that... I mean, I, I think there are many companies inside Zipline that are likely... If it's like, "Oh, that's, like, a public company inside Zipline that's just having to get built from scratch," we're building it because every part of the ecosystem we sort of had to build from scratch t- to enable the overall technology to flourish. Um, you know, air traffic control is an interesting... Like, the more you learn, the more disturbing it is. I mean, we're starting to see the impact. You know, you read about, like, you know, a plane crashing into a helicopter in DC a few months ago. You read about, like, two planes colliding on, um, I think on a, on a taxiway in an airport. I don't remember where that was, a month ago. You're like, "Wow, why are all these accidents happening?" Turns out, like, 50% of air traffic controllers are over the age of 45. 20% are all, are, are about to retire. And nobody is going into air traffic control as a career path right now in the US. And so there's actually a huge labor crisis, [laughs] uh, around these kinds of jobs. And, and so y- you, you have pressure coming from different angles for, like, transformation is required, that we cannot use a system that was designed for airspace, for airspace in the 1950s. The labor isn't available to do it even if we wanted to. And also, there is this, like, giant influx of new technology, AI, and autonomous vehicles that are gonna require us to transform how these systems work.

13. 36:08 – 41:40

    Why Zipline Is Vertical

    1. ALAlfred Lin36:08

       So you're a hardware company and a software company. You build, you design your own custom-

    2. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton36:12

       Operations, manufacturing

    3. ALAlfred Lin36:13

       ... you design your own parts. You build the own aircraft. You write your own software.

    4. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton36:19

       You, you do your own operations. This is a pretty vertically integrated company. Talk about the benefits of, like, complete vertical integration versus buying component parts or buying component software and putting it all together.

    5. EWEric Watson36:33

       And how you get people who come from such different disciplines and domains to see eye to eye and work together collaboratively.

    6. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton36:41

       Yeah. I mean, I think that interestingly, you know, this is-- doing it is such an incredible pain in the butt-

    7. EWEric Watson36:47

       [laughs]

    8. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton36:48

       ... that you would never do it. Like, if you, you know... I have this flag over my desk that says, "We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought that it would be easy."

    9. EWEric Watson36:56

       [laughs]

    10. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton36:57

        And this is definitely, like, the definition of Zipline, you know? And it's such a pain in the butt, actually, that it's almost, if you look at the history of all these hardware companies, they all try to not do it first. Like, you can look at the Roadster, right? They're like, "We're gonna use a Lotus Elise chassis. We're gonna buy the battery pack from a secondary supplier, and we're just gonna put the two together and it's gonna be awesome." You know, kind of, Roadster, it lost a lot of money and wasn't very reliable, right? But, like, it was, it was an important part of getting to the Model S. Zipline, when we started, you know, Eric knows well, we were, like, buying everything from suppliers. We were, like, you know, paying people to design different parts of the system for us or trying to buy off-the-shelf stuff, and we crashed airplanes, I mean, at test sites. And we just, we crashed and we crashed, and we realized, wow, this stuff is, like, super expensive and it's also totally unreliable. And so y- you know, part by part you're like, "All right, well, like, rip that out. We'll design the motor controller from scratch." Okay. Rip that out. We're gonna have to describe, you know, design the GPS module-

    11. EWEric Watson37:52

        Navigation system. Yeah

    12. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton37:52

        ... from scratch. Navigation system. So, you know, part by part you sort of, like, rip it out, and I think there's a fundamental realization, probably similar to the realization that happened that made the Model S possible is like, hey, if we wanna build a really great specific product in this totally new area of technology, we're gonna have to design every single one of these components from scratch to meet the specific requirements of this new area. You know, you might think, "Oh, like, drones. I mean, there are already lots of drones," 'cause DJI makes, you know, plastic quadcopters and they make millions of them, and, like, the US buys $20 million predator aircraft that can fly a hundred mile. The reality is actually both of these systems are very unreliable, and nothing is in a level of, like, reliability and safety at unit economics that would work for this new industry that Zipline was trying to kinda, like, pioneer. And so we realized we had to go build, like, an automotive grade solution.

    13. EWEric Watson38:44

        Mm.

    14. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton38:44

        It has to be super reliable, and it has to be extremely cost effective, 'cause you're competing against cars and motorcycles, which are actually really cost effective.

    15. EWEric Watson38:52

        Mm.

    16. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton38:52

        And we've got 100 years to make them reliable and cheap. So you never do it, uh, I think intentionally. Maybe you just, like, slowly freak out and through desperation realize, like, "Wow, we gotta tear all this shit out and we gotta build it all from scratch." The advantage of doing it from scratch is, like, is speed and integration. And so, you know, our offices, you guys know 'cause you've been, but, like, when you visit Zipline's offices, I mean, we are all, like, absolutely packed into, [chuckles] like, you know, sardines into this small building where you have firmware engineers sitting next to mechanical engineers sitting next to autonomy engineers sitting next to, you know, cloud infra sitting next to, um, aero, aero acoustics, guidance navigation controls, systems engineering, manufacturing engi- everything, all everybody in one place. And then our factory is a three-minute drive away. And so our team is, like, on the factory floor working, seeing parts get integrated into the overall system. And then we have our test sites, which are just a short drive away, so you can go to the test sites, watch the vehicles flying, observe how the system is performing. Like, combining all these things together means that, you know, stuff is always breaking, stuff's always going wrong. As Eric had described, the advantage is when the thing goes wrong, we can basically go straight to the person's desk and be like, "You and I are pulling an all-nighter tonight."

    17. EWEric Watson40:09

        Hmm.

    18. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton40:10

        Whereas if you're Boeing and something's going wrong with the battery on the 787, you're, like, going and suing a supplier and taking, you know, two years to try to figure out whose fault it is, and, like, it's three layers deep in the rat's nest, you know, cluster of, like, how these procurement deals and supply chains work for, for aerospace. This is why it's so broken.

    19. EWEric Watson40:32

        Yeah. I think, Pat, to your, your kind of question there about getting these different discipline folks to work together-

    20. SPSpeaker40:37

        Yeah

    21. EWEric Watson40:38

        ... I honestly think it's quite easy. Um, it's easy when you have set up the way that Keller just mentioned, right? Like, first of all, everyone's rowing in the same direction. We all have the same goals. And when you can ground it in reality and it's tangible, then we're all just here to solve the same problems, right?

    22. SPSpeaker40:52

        Yeah.

    23. EWEric Watson40:52

        So we actually, with the vertical integration, with having a very diverse team, we actually cut through a lot of the stuff, right? A lot of the things that happen where, oh, well, you know, that engineer won't tell me what the actual source code does 'cause they said it's IP, and so we don't actually know what the fault detection looks like, and you don't have any of that. You just, like, literally go walk over, sit next to the person's desk and be like, "Hey, I, we failed that test. Tell me about how this part of the system works."

    24. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton41:16

        Hmm.

    25. EWEric Watson41:16

        "Oh, cool. Pull up the code. Great. Let's look through it. Oh, interesting. You're making that assumption? That's not how I designed it." Right? "Cool. Let's get to the bottom of it." Right? And so this idea of just rapid collaboration where you're just, you know, the manufacturing team, the operations team, the engineering team are all just, like, really together is the way to solve these problems. And I, I have found that it's actually not that hard, right? When you have the, those ingredients, it actually makes it, you know, makes it pretty fast and efficient.

14. 41:40 – 44:45

    First Principles Delete Parts

    1. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton41:40

       And, you know, too, I mean, Eric saying that, it really makes you realize when you build these, like, complex, you know, AI and robotic systems that combine hardware and software, you really appreciate, like, the deep religious truth of how dumb requirements usually are.

    2. EWEric Watson41:56

       [laughs]

    3. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton41:56

       Question every requirement, which is, you know, the nu- number one part of, like, Elon's algorithm they talk about at SpaceX. Like, question every requirement is, like, this is, like, so profoundly and deeply true. You must have every team question every requirement. The requirement is always stupid.

    4. EWEric Watson42:12

       [laughs]

    5. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton42:12

       When you-- And you're like, well, you know, it's, but you go to this team, that team. You're like, o- often you have to dig, like, two levels deep to realize, like, this is... But, um- Questioning every requirement is a fundamental part of, like, getting through this. And then, you know, the other thing is, um, delete the part. The most reliable part on an aircraft is the part that is not on the aircraft at all.

    6. EWEric Watson42:30

       Hmm.

    7. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton42:30

       Because you deleted it in the last design. That part will never fail. And you know, you take a lot of inspiration from looking at, like, the Raptor 1, Raptor 2, Raptor 3. I'm sure you've seen, you know-

    8. EWEric Watson42:40

       Yeah

    9. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton42:40

       ... those, those engines next to each other.

    10. EWEric Watson42:42

        Yeah.

    11. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton42:42

        And actually, a lot of people who come to the factory now and get to see, like, the EV3 aircraft. You can see the EV2 aircraft or the EV1 aircraft, plus, like, the 10 different hardware versions that we built on the initial, uh, on the, on the first version of Zipline's technology. Um, you would just delete, delete, delete. Like, you know, there's a huge amount of... It's really hard to delete things.

    12. EWEric Watson43:00

        Yeah.

    13. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton43:01

        It's an act of courage. No one wants [chuckles] to delete the thing. You look like an idiot if you delete the thing, and then, like, the system-

    14. EWEric Watson43:08

        Doesn't work

    15. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton43:08

        ... can't perform or doesn't work because you deleted the thing. But, like, you know, true confidence in, like, the physics and the performance of the system enables you to start deleting things. It's a big advantage of having, like, full integrate, full stack integrated control of all of these systems. It makes it possible to question every requirement. It makes it possible to delete parts.

    16. EWEric Watson43:27

        Yeah, I think first principles thinking is a huge part of that. I remember the, um, Platform 1 aircraft, early days it had a deployable tailhook is how it landed. So it had this big hook. It's like a meter long, that would come down from the aircraft, and then we had a line that would catch that and slow the airplane down. It was this kind of complicated contraption.

    17. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton43:43

        [laughs]

    18. EWEric Watson43:44

        And we had this idea that we should be able to move that complexity to the ground systems-

    19. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton43:49

        Yeah

    20. EWEric Watson43:50

        ... and have the recovery system, the landing system, more like a aircraft carrier, like crab the airplane, right? We can, can, you know, put the actuation on basically a robot that goes up and grabs the airplane. And we're like, "Man, that's gonna make the aircraft so much simpler, so much lighter, so much more reliable." Um, we didn't have it working yet, and it was time to, to build that next generation of the aircraft, and we're like, "So do... We're building these next week. Do we build them with the meter-long tailhook, or do we delete the tailhook and put the two-centimeter-long tailhook on the back and bet that we can get this thing working?" We got in a room, we're like, "Delete it," right? Like, "Let's do this thing." And so we're like, "From first principles, it should work. We can make it work. We haven't done it yet, but we can do it." And the next couple weeks looked like [laughs] myself included, a lot of people pulling a lot of, a lot of late nights, uh, getting that thing working, and sure enough, those first aircraft came and we caught them and, and landed them. So it's a lot of courage, um, but that, like really being grounded in first principles thinking with a tight integrated team is, is how you do that.

15. 44:45 – 55:18

    Market Explosion and Closing Thoughts

    1. SPSpeaker44:45

       Is there a version of the future in which instead of delivering life-saving medicine and cheeseburgers, you're delivering human beings? [laughs]

    2. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton44:52

       Uh-oh.

    3. EWEric Watson44:53

       [laughs]

    4. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton44:54

       Hey, I'm the board member that has to control their costs. [laughs]

    5. SPSpeaker44:57

       [laughs]

    6. EWEric Watson44:58

       [laughs] Yeah.

    7. SPSpeaker44:59

       I mean, you know, safe, reliable, battle tested. I don't know. Seems like, seems like if we're gonna liberate ourselves from the tyranny of streets, it's a pretty decent solution.

    8. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton45:09

       Gosh, I- I- I think I agree with you. Um, I think that-

    9. SPSpeaker45:13

       [laughs]

    10. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton45:14

        ... you know, co-

    11. EWEric Watson45:14

        He's gonna come to you and ask for another billion dollars. [laughs]

    12. SPSpeaker45:17

        [laughs]

    13. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton45:19

        Um, I think, you know, a couple thoughts. Like, one is that I think Alfred knows I'm measured in the way I answer that question because to be clear, like, you know, building a new infrastructure layer for the planet that can deliver packages as efficiently as the internet moves information is gonna be one of the biggest companies on Earth. Like, it's a huge opportunity, and we definitely wanna stay, like, humble and paranoid about how super hard that's gonna be. The level of execution for us to scale the way we wanna scale over the next couple years. And, you know, to put it into perspective, I, I described this goal of getting to a million deliveries a day in the, in the very near future. We now have many partners who are at each asking to buy a million deliveries a day of capacity from Zipline-

    14. SPSpeaker46:02

        Hmm

    15. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton46:03

        ... in the last few months. And so our operating plan has now become our unit of sale. That's a pretty crazy realization, and it's leading us... You know, we had originally built the, we, we had sized the entire factory to build, uh, 20,000 aircraft a year. That was what, about what was required for a million deliveries a day. Like, all of this is kind of being thrown... We're realizing the market is way bigger. And one, one thing, you know, when you look at this, you know, totally hyperbolic curve that I think I showed you only a few months ago of, like, you know, the, what our total flights have b- you know, total daily flight volumes have done over the last 16 months. The level of complexity of all the different systems that are required to basically, like, stay on that track, um, is quite high.

    16. EWEric Watson46:46

        Yeah.

    17. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton46:47

        But, you know, there are five and a half billion instant deliveries being done by humans in the United States every year, and that's, you know, we're us- we're using a 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle.

    18. EWEric Watson46:59

        It's not really instant. It's like-

    19. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton47:01

        Yeah

    20. EWEric Watson47:01

        ... half an hour to an hour.

    21. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton47:02

        Exactly. It's good marketing that it's called instant, but yeah, exactly. And, uh, you know, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour. You know, a significant percentage of the drivers report eating some of the food that they've delivered in the last month.

    22. EWEric Watson47:13

        [laughs]

    23. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton47:13

        Like, more than 50%. Um, there are significant safety, you know, concerns associated with these kinds of delivery. But five and a half billion instant deliveries, what we're realizing when you look... You know, Zipline is now at massive scale in Dallas, and we're, we're now launching four more metros in the next four months. Um, when you l- just look at Dallas, if you were to extend the buying behavior that we're observing from Zipline customers in Dallas to the rest of the United States, there would be 55 billion instant deliveries happening, not 5.

    24. SPSpeaker47:41

        Wow.

    25. EWEric Watson47:42

        55 billion.

    26. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton47:43

        Yeah. There's a huge market expansion. I think it's similar to how people looked at Uber when they were launching in San Francisco, and they're like, "Oh, even if Uber gets to be 33% of the taxi market in San Francisco-"

    27. EWEric Watson47:54

        Yeah

    28. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton47:54

        ... "it's only gonna be a $15 billion company." And obviously, what they missed is, like, Uber's now 10 times the size of the taxi market. You know, like, if you make something more convenient and less expensive and a better product experience, people are gonna consume a lot more of it. We are clearly seeing customer behavior where customers order every day rather than a couple times a month. Um, I mean, I met a grandma the other day who's ordered 350 times from Zipline in the last year.

    29. EWEric Watson48:18

        [laughs]

    30. KCKeller Rinaudo Cliffton48:19

        She's 80 years old.

Episode duration: 55:18